Trying to be thoughtful about sock yarns in a period where I knit socks constantly and quite quickly has led to all manner of interesting insights. This post introduces another. At present it is not an option for me to leave home without a sock in progress. I’m spending a lot of time on public transport–which is good, but requires management. I go to a lot of meetings and presentations–which is sometimes good and sometimes challenging. Socks help me!

The tuffsocksnaturally project has been one great outcome of trying to move in an eco-friendly direction–and I have sock yarn spinning to show! However, creating sock yarn involves slowly spinning (I can’t take that on the bus!), dyeing, washing and converting skeins to balls. All of which is pleasurable time spent but certainly does take time. In the case of my Suffolk adventures, I also need to be confident the intended recipient will enjoy and be able to comfortably wear the resulting socks, which requires some chat. BUT: if there is some point where I do not have a handspun sock ready to knit and I reach the end of my current pair–I need a plan!

A while back, I went to a two day meeting in Parramatta, which is now part of greater Sydney. The tree and the sculpture are images from my roaming around in the few daylight hours I had outside a meeting there. As I prepared to leave for an entire two days of meeting, with airport waiting, airtrain trips, waiting in train stations, and who knows what kind of night in a hotel, I ran out of sock yarn. So I decided to knit leftover yarns in the same colour family into socks. Yes, dear Readers, I am blessed with friends who have said to me “just knit up whatever you’ve got! I’m not bothered if you use up your scraps” or, when I asked another friend if he fancied socks that were knit this way, said that sounded like fun. To me this sounded a lot more attractive as a knitting project than some of the patterns I see popping up from time to time directed at people like me who have knit a lot of socks and have leftover sock yarns (some of which go to the recipient so they can darn in the future but some of which stay with me).

And that is how one of my friends came to get these socks, which were received with a squeak of glee!

Keep knitting those scraps , your creations are a fun surprise. Some of the wartime creations created from scraps and recycled wool were fabulous and would never have been made if there had been sufficient affordable wool available. I think creating from only what is immediately available forces us all to be more creative than we would normally be .